Jack was delighted.
"I'll send him down to your place in the morning," he exclaimed; "that is, with your permission, he shall come directly after breakfast. Perhaps you will be going skating or something. If so, he might meet you on the rink?"
She smiled at his eagerness.
"I shall be pleased to see your brother any time. Now I fear I must go. Is not that eight o'clock striking? My cook will never forgive me."
A miserable cuckoo-clock shrieked the hour with intolerable emphasis, and reminded them all of the flesh-pots. Jack, however, remembered his manners sufficiently to escort her down the hillside, and it was a quarter past eight when he left her at her own door. The snow still fell fast, and the wind howled dismally up the valley. It was going to be a dreadful night.
"You won't forget," he said as he turned at her gate and drew the collar of his heavy coat about his ears. She answered that she would expect Benny sometime during the morning, and immediately went in to ask her servant if anyone had come. When Louise retorted with a shrug of the shoulders and the inquiry, "Who would come upon such a night?" Madame had nothing to say.
The hours were making it very difficult for her to believe the best. The dawn found her still awake, and quite prepared for that hour of crisis which such a life as Luton's had made inevitable.
CHAPTER XII
FLIGHT
The Abbé Villari slept at Benny's chalet that night, fearful of the storm, and not a little concerned at the absence of its master. This anxiety he shared with Jack, who suggested a hundred reasons which might have taken Benny to Sierre, but none which could have kept him there—unless it were the storm, which in the case of such a man seemed altogether insufficient.